“Cumberer of the earth”: Suffering and suicide among the faithful in the civil war south

The most famous suicide of the American Civil War was undoubtedly that of Edmund Ruffin, fire-eating secessionist from Virginia whose actions bookended the Civil War. Ruffin fired the first shot of the war – he was given the honor of detonating the first volley at Fort Sumter – as well as the last, when on June 17, 1865, he blew his brains out with a silver-plated rifle. Most historical treatments, and virtually all popular ones, have fixated on the Confederacy’s loss as the impetus for Ruffin’s suicide. Ruffin was a high-profile public figure, well known outside the South as well as within as an ardent supporter of secession and independence. A political explanation for his suicide thus corresponds with the man and all he stood for. But most accounts focus only on a brief portion of his lengthy twelve-page suicide note in which he indeed excoriated “the Yankee race” and adamantly declared his refusal to live under “Yankee domination and despotism.” Even Ruffin’s son and namesake Edmund Ruffin Jr. assured his own sons – Ruffin’s grandsons – that “the subjugation of our country has weighed heavily on his mind and determined him to take the final step.” Although the prospect of living in a defeated South surely contributed to Ruffin’s decision to end his life, a fuller, closer examination of his rather lengthy, researched, and contemplative explanation of that decision, including an interrogation of religious texts to justify the deed, illuminates important notions about suicide at the mid-nineteenth century. Ruffin’s suicide serves as both a starting and ending point for a discussion of how religious white Southerners viewed suicide in the wake of war and loss.